HAVANA (Reuters) - Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro said the U.S. government misinformed Americans and the world about 9/11, echoing conspiracy theories about the terror attacks against the United States six years ago.

In an essay read by a Cuban television presenter on Tuesday night, Castro said the Pentagon was hit by a rocket, not a plane, because no traces were found of its passengers.

"Today one knows there was deliberate misinformation," wrote Castro, who has not appeared in public since July of 2006 when life-threatening surgery for a secret illness forced him to hand over power to his brother Raul Castro.

"Studying the impact of planes, similar to those that hit the Twin Towers, that had accidentally fallen on densely populated cities, one concludes that it was not a plane that crashed into the Pentagon," Castro said.

"Only a projectile could have caused the geometrically round hole that allegedly was made by the plane," he said.

Three ground zero workers who accompanied filmmaker Michael Moore on a trip to Cuba for medical treatment featured in his new movie "Sicko'' charged they were targeted by the U.S. government because of their participation.

"It's ridiculous after what we did for the city and the country on that day, that they won't allow us to go 90 miles offshore to get treated,'' Reggie Cervantes, a 46-year-old EMT who worked with only a thin dust mask after the World Trade Center collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001, said.

The Brooklyn-based worker, among the first responders performing triage on the street below the burning towers, now suffers from severe pulmonary diseases, as well as kidney and liver problems.

NEW YORK — It could have been a college reunion: hugs, tears, laughter, photos, and a big friendly guy in shorts and sneakers organizing it all. But the guy in shorts was Michael Moore, whose new documentary, Sicko, takes aim at the U.S. health care industry with the same fury — laced with humor, of course, and plenty of statistics — that he directed at the Bush administration in his hit Fahrenheit 9/11.

And the people who'd flown in for this intimate first screening, a day after the film had been shipped to the Cannes Film Festival, included grateful Sept. 11 "first responders," suffering lung problems or other ailments from their days at ground zero. In the film, Moore takes them to Cuba and tries to get them treated at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay — where, he contends, terror suspects were getting better medical care than the heroes of 9/11.

Michael Moore will never get a standing ovation from the Bush Administration, but he certainly won't complain about the free publicity he's getting for his newest documentary, SiCKO. Free publicity for an adversary may not have been the government's intention, but that has certainly been the effect of the investigation Washington has launched against Moore just one week before the movie's slated premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.

Last March, six months after his initial request for travel documents, the award-winning documentary filmmaker visited Cuba. There, he filmed a segment of SiCKO, his movie focusing on the failing U.S. health-care industry. For the segment, Moore had taken along ten 9/11 first-responders who have been suffering respiratory problems ever since.

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore is under investigation by the U.S. Treasury Department for taking ailing Sept. 11 rescue workers to Cuba for a segment in his upcoming health-care documentary "Sicko," The Associated Press has learned.

The investigation provides another contentious lead-in for a provocative film by Moore, a fierce critic of President Bush. In the past, Moore's adversaries have fanned publicity that helped the filmmaker create a new brand of opinionated blockbuster documentary.

"Sicko" promises to take the health-care industry to task the way Moore confronted America's passion for guns in "Bowling for Columbine" and skewered Bush over his handling of Sept. 11 in "Fahrenheit 9/11."

The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control notified Moore in a letter dated May 2 that it was conducting a civil investigation for possible violations of the U.S. trade embargo restricting travel to Cuba. A copy of the letter was obtained Tuesday by the AP.

April 15, 2007 -- Filmmaker Michael Moore's production company took ailing Ground Zero responders to Cuba in a stunt aimed at showing that the U.S. health-care system is inferior to Fidel Castro's socialized medicine, according to several sources with knowledge of the trip.

The trip was to be filmed as part of the controversial director's latest documentary, "Sicko," an attack on American drug companies and HMOs that Moore hopes to debut at the Cannes Film Festival next month.

Two years in the making, the flick also takes aim at the medical care being provided to people who worked on the toxic World Trade Center debris pile, according to several 9/11 workers approached by Moore's producers.

U.S. military officials have held initial hearings for three terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, including the alleged mastermind of the September 11 attacks on the United States, the Pentagon said on Monday.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said a three-member panel examined the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed at a closed hearing on Saturday at the U.S. military prison camp on Cuba.

Mohammed is among 14 prisoners identified by U.S. authorities as "high-value" terrorism suspects and transferred to Guantanamo last September from secret CIA prisons abroad.

The hearings to determine whether the suspects meet U.S. authorities' definition of an enemy combatant began on Friday, the Pentagon said.

The cases of two suspects -- Ramzi bin al Shaibah, a Yemeni also accused of involvement in the September 11 attacks, and alleged senior al Qaeda figure Abu Faraj al Libi of Libya -- were examined on Friday, Whitman said.